The image of Dallas as a bulwark of right-wing extremism lodged in the American mind during the early 1960s.

The reality was more complicated. Most people, here as elsewhere, were more interested in orbiting astronauts, James Bond movies and Elvis than they were in attending meetings of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society.

But complexity surrendered to the image when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. Dallas became known to the world as the city of hate, the city that killed Kennedy.

The negative narrative had taken root three years earlier, when U.S. Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, visited Dallas shortly before the 1960 presidential election. Johnson was a moderate Democrat and by far the state’s most powerful politician. More important, he was JFK’s running mate.

A gaggle of disagreeable Kennedy detractors, mostly well-dressed women, confronted the Johnsons upon their arrival at the Adolphus Hotel. They surrounded the startled couple on the street, screaming and spitting at them.

The greeting party had been organized by U.S. Rep. Bruce Alger, an archconservative Dallas Republican and a supporter of Kennedy’s election opponent, Richard Nixon. As the Johnsons were accosted, Alger stood nearby holding a sign that said, “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.”

File/Dallas Times Herald

Republican U.S. Rep. Bruce Alger of Dallas was among hundreds who met Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife with derogatory signs and chants in Dallas in November 1960.

The confrontation drew national attention.

Conservatives in other cities voiced concerns about JFK. But in Dallas they screamed them with a venom that frightened many.

“You could feel it in the air,” recalled historian Darwin Payne, who was a Dallas newspaper reporter in the early 1960s. “When I hear some people express hatred for [President Barack] Obama, it feels the same. But I never have felt we are on the verge of anything like the events I witnessed back then.”

John Birch Society HQ

In the 1950s and early ’60s, fear of communism and of nuclear war with the Soviet Union spread across America like a political flu.

The John Birch Society designated Dallas a regional headquarters and opened a bookstore here. The society preached that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — among many others — were willing dupes of the Communist Party.

Robert Welch, the retired candy manufacturer who founded the John Birch Society, was convinced that communists controlled American labor unions, the leaders of the civil rights movement — and John F. Kennedy.

Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, authors of a new book, Dallas 1963,said extremists in Dallas didn’t just criticize Kennedy; they painted him as a traitor.

“There was something in Dallas that seemed to be summoning people to a raw, hard-edged resistance to JFK,” said Minutaglio, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former staff writer at The Dallas Morning News. “We believe it was a distinct minority, but pretty powerful at the top.”

And none wielded more power than H.L. Hunt. The oil titan was reputed to be the richest man in America. He wasn’t shy about spending his money to advance his political beliefs.

On Feb. 15, 1960, eight months before the assault on LBJ and Lady Bird outside the Adolphus, Hunt appeared at a downtown bookstore to autograph copies of his utopian novel,Alpaca. Despite the frosty weather, hundreds of Dallas residents lined up outside the bookstore.

The book, a thinly veiled political manifesto, told the story of Juan Achala, a citizen of “Alpaca” who traveled the world in search of the perfect constitution for his small nation.

Hunt the novelist revealed that Hunt the oil baron had little use for the ideal of political equality.

In his perfect world, the wealthiest citizens — those paying the most taxes — would be given extra votes.

Political discussion would be prohibited on television and radio, and at any meeting of more than 200 people. This was to prevent demagogues from influencing the masses.

The speech restrictions were odd, given that Hunt spent the previous decade using TV and radio to push his political views through Facts Forum, a propaganda outlet masquerading as a “public service” program. Hunt was baldly pro-business and anti-regulation. He despised communism, the United Nations and John F. Kennedy.

As Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, was pursing the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Hunt secretly financed the printing of 200,000 copies of an anti-Catholic sermon by the Rev. W.A. Criswell, the influential pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. Criswell argued that if a Catholic became president, the pope would dictate American policy.

Clint Murchison, another prominent Dallas oil man, opposed Kennedy’s plans for expanded federal aid to the poor. More important, Kennedy seemed sympathetic to rolling back the oil depletion allowance, a tax break that helped men like Hunt and Murchison grow even wealthier.

Jane Wolfe, author of The Murchisons: The Rise and Fall of a Texas Dynasty, said Murchison and other Texas oil magnates were shocked when LBJ agreed to become JFK’s running mate.

“Johnson had enormous clout in the Senate,” Wolfe wrote. “And much of this power was due to these Texas oilmen.”

File/The Associated Press

Former Army Gen. Edwin Walker, in a news conference in Dallas in December 1963, said the "tragic assassination" of John F. Kennedy could have happened in any city, yet he helped fuel tensions in Dallas.

Extreme-right general

One of the right-wing, anti-communist zealots drawn to Dallas in the early 1960s was U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker.

A veteran of World War II and the Korean conflict, Walker resigned his Army commission in November 1961, after civilian superiors in Washington admonished him for pressing John Birch Society literature on his troops.

Walker openly called prominent politicians “pink,” a term for those suspected of being communist sympathizers. He even embraced the John Birch Society’s view that Eisenhower, a World War II hero before becoming president, was a communist. Most people, of course, found that notion absurd.

Nonetheless, the extreme right worshiped Walker as a super-patriot. When he moved to Dallas in December 1961, Mayor Earle Cabell greeted him with a welcoming proclamation, presented before a crowd of 5,000 well-wishers.

Within days, Walker began a campaign for governor of Texas, filing as a candidate in the Democratic primary. Dallas was his campaign headquarters. With the backing of H.L. Hunt, he ran as a states’ rights segregationist dedicated to exposing communists in every walk of life.

In a primary field of six Democrats, he finished sixth.

Walker, however, wasn’t nearly finished carving his name into Dallas’ political history.

In a bizarre twist of history, Walker would become the victim of an assassination attempt April 10, 1963, seven months before Kennedy was killed.

His would-be assassin? Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled ex-Marine and self-described communist who had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 before returning to the United States and settling in Dallas in the summer of 1962.

After Oswald’s arrest in connection with the Kennedy assassination, his wife, Marina, testified that her husband told her he had taken a bus to Walker’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard and, from outside the home, fired one rifle shot at the former general, who was seated at a desk and visible through a window. The bullet struck the window frame, and Walker sustained only minor injuries.

Marina Oswald said her husband told her Walker was the leader of a “fascist organization.” She could offer no logical explanation for why Lee Oswald, an avowed leftist, would target the right-wing extremist Walker and the president, who was despised by so many on the far right.

Attack on U.N. envoy

At his home, Walker flew an American flag upside down — a symbol of distress. Later, he would plant a billboard in his yard calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was viewed by the far right as the evil architect of school integration and the outlawing of officially sanctioned prayers in the classroom.

But those symbols were mere smudges on the national snapshot of Dallas, compared with the attack on U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson II on Oct. 24, 1963, a month before Kennedy’s assassination.

The story goes like this: When Walker heard that Stevenson was coming to Dallas to deliver a speech at Memorial Auditorium commemorating U.N. Day, he scheduled a “U.S. Day” celebration one day earlier at the same downtown locale.

Walker, speaking to 1,000 people, called his gathering a “symbol of our sovereignty,” then added: “Tomorrow night, there will stand here a symbol of the communist conspiracy and its United Nations.”

During Stevenson’s U.N. Day address, a heckler stood up in the audience and began shouting into a bullhorn. He was later identified as a founder of the National Indignation Convention, another right-wing Dallas group that had supported Walker in his failed run for governor.

Police escorted the heckler from the auditorium, but the trouble had just begun.

After the speech, a hostile crowd of about 100 protesters surrounded the ambassador outside the auditorium. Many carried signs denouncing the U.N. — signs that had been stored at Walker’s home, according to Payne, the Dallas historian.

Stevenson tried to reason with the protesters. Suddenly, one woman conked him on the head with her sign. A man spat on him. After police broke through the crowd to rescue him, Stevenson was heard to say, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”

Once again, the spotlight shone on Dallas. “A City Disgraced,” read the headline in Time magazine.

The Dallas Morning News, in an editorial headlined “Our Apologies,” defended the ambassador’s right to deliver his speech and admonished demonstrators for their crude manners. The editorial ended with words that, read today, are chilling:

“The President of the United States will be here in November. We trust he will be welcomed and accorded the respect and dignity that go with the office he represents.”

Newspaper’s editorials

In the early 1960s, the opinion pages of The Dallas Morning News reflected the anti-Kennedy views of the newspaper’s publisher, E.M. “Ted” Dealey. Day after day, editorials and opinion columns criticized the president. He was soft on communism. He was deceitful. He was expanding the reach of the federal government at the expense of individual liberty.

One of the newspaper’s prominent columnists was Robert Morris. Like Walker, he had moved to Dallas in the early 1960s. Morris made his reputation as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on internal security.

Morris had been a close associate of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who became infamous for his witch hunts against imagined communists in the State Department, the Truman White House, the U.S. Army, even the Voice of America.

In a ceremonial 1961 visit to the White House, Ted Dealey decided to let the president know just what he thought of him. The occasion was a luncheon for Texas publishers. When Kennedy asked them if they had any questions, Dealey rose.

Reading from a prepared text, he told Kennedy, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.”

It got worse.

“We need a man on horseback to lead this nation,” Dealey said, “and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

The other publishers were aghast at the rude display. Kennedy kept his cool, but later expressed anger that Dealey had derided him with a reference to his 3-year-old daughter.

On Nov. 22, 1963, The News greeted the first couple with a print version of “good cop, bad cop.”

The newspaper’s lead editorial expressed hope that JFK’s visit to Dallas might help “Democrats, Republicans and Independents unite today in a genuineness of welcome and cordiality.”

However, a full-page advertisement on Page 14, framed by a funereal black border, carried a sarcastic headline: “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas.”

It asked a series of 12 biting questions, each starting with “WHY” in bold capital letters.

“WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election?”

“WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow?’”

And so forth.

The ad was signed by “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” which listed a “Bernard Weissman” as its chairman. But these were fronts.

Warren Commission investigators later determined that Joseph P. Grinnan, an oil broker and local leader of the John Birch Society, had paid for the ad with “around $1,500” donated by three men: H. R. “Bum” Bright, an oil man who later became owner of the Dallas Cowboys; Nelson Bunker Hunt, a son of H.L. Hunt; and Edgar Crissey, an insurance company executive.

Ted Dealey acknowledged approving the ad in advance because it lined up with the editorial opinions of The News.

Stanley Marcus, the head of Neiman Marcus and a Kennedy supporter, reflecting on those times, later said: “The News, in my opinion, was almost single-handedly responsible for the prevailing state of mind in Dallas at the time of the assassination.”

Police chief’s fears

The news that JFK would visit Dallas broke on Sept. 25, 1963. The attack on Stevenson came a month later.

Civic leaders and Dallas police were determined to prevent anything similar from happening when the president and the first lady were in town.

The city had been embarrassed enough.

“As the tension mounted, the small and violent minority were in danger of upsetting the stability of the entire city,” Jesse Curry, the police chief at the time of the assassination, wrote in a 1969 memoir.

Curry was riding in the presidential motorcade on Nov. 22. Cheering crowds lined the route between Love Field and downtown. People waved and strained to catch a glimpse of the president and his wife in their big Lincoln limousine.

The atmosphere contradicted the image of Dallas as a city that hated the president.

“The people of Dallas had turned out in overwhelming numbers and had given the President a vibrant and warm welcome,” Curry recalled. “For a brief moment, I almost started to relax.”

COMMEMORATING JFK

Nov. 2 symposium

Tickets are on sale for the Nov. 2 symposium, “Understanding Tragedy: The Impact of the JFK Assassination on Dallas,” presented by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in partnership withThe Dallas Morning News and other organizations.

The symposium will take place from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at The South Side Ballroom in Dallas and will feature more than a dozen high-profile speakers, including Jim Lehrer, Stephen Carter, Nikky Finney, Richard Rodriguez and Lawrence Wright. The event will explore how President John F. Kennedy’s death affected Dallas from four perspectives: Journalism, Politics, Art & the Humanities, and Religion. Tickets range from $25 to $300 and are available at www.dallasinstitute.org. More information is also available at JFK50.com.